What is warp drive? To what extent can we master this technology?

Like birds flying in the sky, it has always been our human dream to roam freely among the stars, but limited by the level of science and technology, we can only pin this beautiful wish on science fiction works. In "Three-body" and "Star Trek", they both shuttled between the stars through a spaceship driven by warp speed, which can travel several light years in an instant. Who is this warp drive? To what extent can we master this technology?

Einstein's theory of relativity tells us that the speed of light is the fastest in the universe, and nothing can reach the speed of light, but even if it reaches the speed of light, it will take at least five years to reach the nearest star system-Alpha Centauri, not to mention that it is absolutely impossible to build a spacecraft that can reach the speed of light with human technology, because it is absolutely impossible under the framework of relativity.

In order to achieve our goal, we might as well think in another direction. Scientists have imagined a warp drive that can exceed the speed of light. Unlike ordinary aircraft, it flies through the bending of time and space. We know that, just like a ball in water, space will be bent, even compressed or stretched by a huge object. Warp drive is a kind of space-time bending that compresses the front space and then stretches the rear space. In this way, the spacecraft is wrapped in a curvature bubble and moves. In this way, the spacecraft seems to have surpassed the speed of light, but it has not actually reached the speed of light. It is only the distortion of space that shortens the distance, so the theory of warp speed is not contradictory to Einstein's theory of relativity.

What happens when you have a warp drive? To be sure, once we break through this technology, interstellar travel will become a common thing, but we must consider the limit of our own human life to limit the distance we can reach. If the curvature engine is used to make the spacecraft reach 10 times the speed of light, it will only take us 70 seconds to reach Mars, and the time to reach the sun will be even shorter, only about 50 seconds. At that time, we can put on protective clothing in front of the sun and enjoy the source of life quietly. In less than an hour, we can reach Pluto, and it takes about 80 days to leave the solar system. In four months' time, we can reach proxima centauri, the closest star system to the solar system, and neighboring star B is likely to be the alien settlement of human beings. Farther and farther away, we can even explore other planets at close range and see the residents there, if any. The vastness of the universe is beyond imagination. Even with warp-speed spacecraft, we can't visit all the spaces. Our Milky Way alone is about 200,000 light years. It takes us more than 20 years to fly at ten times the speed of light. There are hundreds of millions of such galaxies in the universe.

Of course, the curvature engine is only feasible in theory, but our understanding of all this only exists in theory. We really don't know anything about how to generate energy on schedule, how to overcome such a strong gravitational field and other problems we encounter. Back to now, the fastest detector we have ever made? Juno? It is nearly 1 100 million times slower than the assumed curvature engine, so we still have a long way to go to master this technology.